Voices in the Night Part 24

The doctor's kind eyes, however, drove the thought away; for they were eyes which seemed to see the nightmare, hidden under all the care and the comfort, more clearly than Sister Mary's; though hers were kind to the uttermost also--kind and quick--so that, as she pa.s.sed down the row of beds with the visitors, she left the other sisters and the orderlies busy. And more than once her eyes and the doctor's--the woman's and the man's--met, after looking at a boy's face, with regret or relief in them. But no one said a word of better or worse, except now and again a wistful voice from the beds that stood so close together.

'What young faces!' said Grace in an undertone; there was a constriction in her throat which might have prevented her speaking loud had she wished to do so.

'I doubt if there is a case over two-and-twenty in the ward,' replied Dr. Sullivan, 'except'--he paused beside a cot in the far corner, where a nurse sate at the head and an orderly waited at the foot--'except this one.'

He spoke without any attempt at an aside, for the face staring up with open eyes at the ceiling was unmistakably unconscious; yet, even so, curiously haggard, weary, anxious.

'He is a hospital orderly,' went on the doctor, 'the best nurse I ever came across. I wonder how many fellows he's pulled through in his fifteen years of it. But it has got him at last, though he was careful.

In a hurry possibly, and didn't disinfect; there's been a terrible rush lately, and very little will do it. Poor old Steady Normal!' He laid his hand regretfully on the anxious forehead for an instant, and the expression on his face was mirrored in those around him. 'They called him that, Lady Arbuthnot,' he explained, 'because he used to beam all over when he could echo that report. Well, if anybody pulls through, he ought to, in justice; but it's a bad case. You see, he is saturated with the poison.'

So on and on they pa.s.sed, down one side and up the other, pausing by each bed to look at what lay there, and compare it with the chart which Sister Mary unhooked from the wall and handed to the doctor.

It got on Grace Arbuthnot's nerves at last--the methodical calm of it all, the smiles that were so cheerfully sympathetic or so wistfully impatient, the studious speech, the still more studious silence. Until at last, when the end was near, and Dr. Sullivan's finger, travelling over a chart, pointed out a level after a series of peaks and pa.s.ses, she could not help seeking relief in the remark that 'some one was out of the wood!'

A contented smile came to the face she was leaving, but a look showed on the one she was approaching which struck her like a blow, which she felt she could never forget, so full was it of something akin to anger in its hopeless, helpless blame.

'He is in the thick of it, poor chap,' said the doctor in a low voice; 'only came in yesterday.'

And Grace's eyes, dim with tears, could scarcely see the jagged notches rising higher and higher in the fresh unfingered chart that was being shown her.

'Can nothing be done?' she asked abruptly, when the doctor was driving her over to the mess in his dogcart. The others were walking, and he had just pointed out the temporary hospital they had had to open.

He shook his head. 'G.o.d knows! Sometimes I think I could, with a free hand. We do what we can, as it is, but what can you expect when the men get sitting about the bazaars, and eating and drinking filth. There is only one way out of it now, Lady Arbuthnot, as I hope you'll tell Sir George. Get 'em away into the desert, _not_ to be tempted of the devil, but to--what shall we say?--to--to get back the sinews of war!' he finished, proud of his quotation.

It was apt enough to recur more than once to Grace Arbuthnot's mind as she watched the sports; once, especially, when a tug-of-war began, and a team of boys, big enough, but soft-looking, stood up against the Artillery.

'They haven't a chance against us!' said Nevill Lloyd, with pardonable pride. 'To begin with, we are accustomed to handle ropes; and then!--of course, if the Highlanders had been here still, there'd have been a fight, but these new fellows haven't the sinew--as yet.'

They pulled pluckily, though, for all they were worth, encouraged thereat, amongst other supporters, by a number of big upstanding sepoys from the native lines. They were in _mufti_, which, however, was no disguise to their martial swagger and palpable pride of strength.

'Don't pull, brotherlings!' they advised; 'put the weight on the rope and stand steady. So! Oh, 'tis G.o.d's will! He has not given the weight yet. It will come, brothers! Meanwhile it is fate, not defeat.'

But as they turned carelessly from the end, one said to his neighbour, '_Ari bhai!_ We could have taught the _tope khana-wallahs_ a lesson.'

And the neighbour laughed.

'Yea, if they gave us the chance, but they will not. They know we of the _pultans_ are bigger and stronger than they of the _rigiments_, but they would not have the world know it; as if it could not see!'

As he stood aside cheerfully, almost respectfully, to let a smooth-faced fresh-coloured boy in a red coat pa.s.s, he proved his words, for he towered a good head above him, and could have covered two of him in breadth.

Nevill Lloyd, standing beside the Arbuthnots' carriage, overheard the remark and frowned.

'I should like to challenge those fellows,' he said vexedly. 'I know we could pull 'em over and knock the conceit out of 'em.'

'Then why don't you?' asked Lesley, smiling; she and the aide-de-camp had become fast friends, chiefly over their mutual devotion to Grace Arbuthnot.

'They won't let us. They say it is likely to rouse ill-feeling and all that. And then,' he went on frankly, 'of course it wouldn't do to get licked too often, you know, and one can't expect our boys to collar men who do dumb-bells all day like those fellows do.'

Grace, sitting beside Lesley, thought they might do worse.

But, boys or men, the sports were good, and held half cantonments and not a few from the city, interested in the various events, while the sun sank slowly to the curiously limitless limit of the level horizon.

Lateefa the kite-maker was there, amongst others, finding a sale for his airy nothingnesses betweenwhiles, as he pa.s.sed through the crowd with that quaint cry of--

'Use eyes and choose Eyes use and choose.'

Jehan Aziz was there also, in his third-best brocade coat, and with a half-cringing, half-defiant avoidance of Mr. Lucanaster, who, red-tied as usual, was betting gloves with Mrs. Chris Davenant. For that, the lady in question told herself, was quite the correct thing to do; and as the ball which was to prove her admittance into the best society had not yet come off, Mrs. Chris, as Jack Raymond had predicted, was careful. Though in truth she found a strict adherence to etiquette somewhat slow.

With an easier code and a greater inclination to scorn it, Sobrai Begum was finding the same thing in the half-empty bazaar, where she had been left in charge of a toothless old hag who had once enjoyed the doubtful dignity of Miss Leezie's position, but who, having grown too old for the post, had remained on in the house as a domestic drudge of the most exemplary pattern. The poor old soul, however, suffered from an all too intimate acquaintance with the gutters as they lay reeking in the chill dawns, when those for whom she worked lay still curled up in their wadded quilts. So, when an hour or so had been spent after the approved fas.h.i.+on of her kind, in cozening her charge out of ill-humour, the fever fiend seized on her, and laid her by the heels in a backyard, more than half-unconscious.

Sobrai therefore, relaxed from surveillance, began to wonder sulkily how she had best utilise her freedom. She had been long enough with Miss Leezie to make her remember Lateefa's caution; to make her wonder if Dilaram and the old ways were not best.

There was no reason, nevertheless, why they should be so. She was a clever girl in her way, with an ancestry of pride as well as wickedness; and above all, of a fierce faculty for obtaining personal gratification.

And there was none here. All was rule and regulation. No freedom, no fun, no frivolity; in a way, no choice. But that, she told herself, was the result of Miss Leezie's mean breeding. Dilaram enjoyed herself more, and so would she, Sobrai Begum of the King's House, if _she_ had the management of affairs! Miss Leezie said it would not pay; but what was money beside amus.e.m.e.nt? And who was Miss Leezie to judge? A low born, who did not know, who could not play the part!

A sudden determination to play it for an hour, and see the result, seized on the girl. She had the necessary dress; an old one of her mother's, which she had brought with her in case. The jewels were trumpery, of course, but they looked well. There would be time for a little fun, perhaps, before her task-mistress returned and the bazaar filled.

It was a full hour after this determination of hers, and the dusk had begun to fall, when a young fellow in a red coat came lounging through the still empty bazaar.

He had just come out of a six weeks' sojourn in hospital, and so his pockets were full, for a soldier's, with unstopped ration money. He had, indeed, intended to lavish some of it at the sports, and so celebrate his return to freedom; but, being still given to invalid habits, he had fallen asleep after barrack dinner, only awaking to find his comrades, and every available conveyance, gone. So, feeling ill-used, he had s.h.i.+rked the walk, sulked for a while, and finally, having nothing else to do, sought the perennial possibilities of the bazaar round the corner.

Even that was dreary. Sweetmeat sellers, fruit sellers, liquor sellers, had all followed their clients to the Artillery parade-ground. The very balconies were empty. So, in a mood compounded of recklessness and bitter home-sickness, he kicked up some one in the shop below Miss Leezie's apartments, insisted on drink, and sitting down on a chair placed for him over the gutter, relapsed into a sort of half-fierce, half-sullen torpor. It was not in truth very lively for a fairly well educated boy, who had only himself to thank that he was not--as his schoolfellows were, for the most part--a city clerk with a cycle! But he had been restless, and he had read _Soldiers Three_ and the _Arabian Nights_.

He looked savagely round the glowing gloom--for the attractions of a musical ride by torchlight kept even the shopkeepers late, and so the cavernous shadows of their squalid shops were still unlit--and swore under his breath at India, and all its ways and works. No fun, no music-halls, no anything. Nothing worth being wicked about, even.

He gulped down the vile mixture of flat soda and bad brandy, turned his chair round to face the houses, and c.o.c.king his feet up on the plinth before the stairs which led up to Miss Leezie's balconies, settled himself to wait till the bazaar became lively. It would be more so than usual, of course, that evening, since the men had to return to barracks through it. It was only a question of waiting till some interest came into life.

One came very soon and quite unexpectedly.

This entrance to the balconies was part.i.tioned off from the shops on either side, and consisted of a tiny, empty square, hung with a withered garland or two above the door which blocked the stairs.

This was closed; but it opened slowly, after a time, and a girl stepped out into the square, that was little bigger than a sentry-box, stepped out till the billowy curves of faded brocade about her feet almost touched those of No. 34 B Company.

He sate up and stared. This was something he had never seen before!

This was the Arabian Nights!

It was, however, only Sobrai in the dress of a princess of the blood royal; softly orange and yellow in her trailing skirts, faintly purple and gold above, with a starred green veil hiding all but the gleam of sham jewels, the l.u.s.tre of false pearls, and a finger-tip placed in warning where the lips should be.

He took the hint and stared silently, his blood racing through his veins, not from any suggestion of balconies and their like, but from curiosity, from excitement, from, in a way, the admiration which is the ant.i.thesis of balconies; for though he knew it not, Sobrai's dress and address were those of the virtuous woman entertaining her lawful owner.

So, with a _salaam_, whose grace had been caught from Noormahal, the girl slipped to the ground among her brocades, and No. 34 B Company instinctively slipped his feet from the plinth also.

There was silence for a second or two; then another hand stole out from the green and gold stars that were so shadowy, yet so clear. A hand clasping an hour-gla.s.s drum by its narrow waist, and twirling it gently so that the leaded silken ta.s.sels on its fringe did the duty of fingers, and sent that strange unrest throbbing out into the air.

But the voice that followed it robbed the sound of its usual character, and took the restlessness into a definite cause. For Sobrai's song was not of the bazaars. It was of the palaces. A bard's song of old days and dead kings, of war, and death, and victory. No. 34 B Company sate with his hands clenching his knees and listened almost stupidly, until, suddenly, a returning torch flung a great beam of glaring light into the shadows which almost hid the singer, and revealed a pair of black eyes amid the stars.

He stood up then, and caught his breath in hard.